21) EMC RAMP: with their gamification platform, the company rewarded positive behavior from employees, partners and customers which led to a 10% increase in documentation, 40% more videos watched and 15% more discussions

10) Teleflora gamified its store with a social engagement scheme offering points for actions, increasing traffic from facebook by 105% and conversion rates by 92%

11) America’s Army:30% of americans age to 16 to 24 had a more positive impression towards and has recruited more people than all the other methods combined while costing a fraction of the marketing cost

4) Subsequent research in the same social network service above showed the effects of removing the point based levels, status titles, and leaderboards. The removal of the game mechanics showed a significant result as across the board activities on the social network service dropped by 52%.

Ariane C Hey Ariane,
It’s not a real taboo, but since the majority of the world still likes to say, “Gamification will never work” or “it’s a fad” it has just been more meaningful to find examples that worked very well.

The EGC Wiki has a small but growing list of gamification failures: http://www.gamification-workshop.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Failure

Hi Yukai / fellow gamification enthusiasts !
I was wondering if anyhone had some example of “bad” gamification cases (by bad I mean that they didn’t have any effects, or little, or bad ones). I found Goole News Badges, Jetblue, and maybe the Adobe Photoshop one, but I have the feeling that “bad gamification cases” are a huge taboo…

Hey YuKai,
Thanks for putting up an exhaustive & interesting list here. This will be helping me for my paper on gamification. I’m researching on Online and ISVs, how gamification has helped these domains. Any pointers or case studies on few companies will be helpful.

Bob Cowen Yu-kai Chou True, making things fun should be evolutionary indeed. The practice itself is evolutionary and just reaching the “tipping point.” I think when people refer to it as revolutionary, I think it’s referring to revolutionary in traditional thinking, as most environments and designs still can’t fathom the combination of work and play.

Yu-kai Chou Bob Cowen
The purpose of mentioning the 10 year old study was to demonstrate that it’s been around that long already (and the results remain valid). The other links have numerous examples and case studies that are as current as last month.
Yes, it’s become more mainstream, automated and elegant marketplace but has been used in businesses extensively for decades.
There are 18 sessions at Dreamforce with the word “Gamification” in the title and numerous folks will claim to be the “father of Gamification.” It’s a simple, proven process that is now being significantly expanded, has a new name and lots of funding thrown at the new vendors. It’s evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Bob Cowen Yu-kai Chou Haha yes, gamification (or making things fun or applying game rules to practices) isn’t that new, and can be traced back for quite a bit. However, it’s only recent years that it’s becoming a bit more mainstream, with better and more refined practices due to the massive trial-and-error of games.
These case studies are great, but since they are from 10 years ago, it’s good to have the above list that has more recent examples too.
Thanks Bob!

Yu-kai Chou Bob Cowen A very comprehensive meta-study was published more than 10 years ago: http://snowfly.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Vol16_03_46condly.pdf
Case studies: http://snowfly.com/resources/case-studies-success-stories/
White papers & research: http://snowfly.com/resources/white_papers_and_research/
What most people fail to realize is that what today is called “gamification” has been used extensively in call centers since they were created in the mid-1970’s. The “new” components are the name and that it’s now being utilized in the consumer marketplace. The often quoted Gardner study predicting a failure rate of 80% has already been disproven in call centers. We usually see that 1/3 of programs aren’t measured, 1/3 generates negative results and 1/3 generates positive results (typically a 20%-40% improvement in KPI’s). We also find that spending about 1% to 2% of payroll is more than sufficient to move the needle. That provides an excellent ROI (as numerous clients will attest). The same cautionary comments apply about not automating an already bad system.

You can find lots of gamifiction research documents, white papers, case studies on the Snowfly web site. They have been offering gamification as a cloud service since 1999 (long before it was called gamification) and was founded by Brooks Mitchell Ph.D.

Thanks Yu-Kai, I came across Foldit when I wrote about an interactive game called “Velu the Welder” for the National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2011.jsp I think Foldit achieved remarkable success and surpassed anyones expectation on its ROI!!!
If we truly understand the process and design a game that will suit the needs well, I’m sure we can have a “Foldit moment”